Images captured with a digital camera or a camera phone are normally taken into a personal computer (PC) and viewed on a monitor, or processed e.g. saved, edited, deleted or the like. In the image processing like editing, a list of thumbnail images that are reduced images is displayed on the monitor for selecting an image (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2005-223854).
Various types of content information, besides the images taken with the digital camera or the camera phone, are displayed in list form on the monitor. The content information include both motion and still images, web pages, logos and the like obtained through the internet. On the internet, enormous amounts of content information are constantly been uploaded, and they can be obtained in real time. Therefore, different content information can be displayed in list form every time users access to the internet.
Accompanying information such as keywords can be attached as a tag to each piece of content information. Such tags are shown in list form on the internet. The list of tags is called a tag cloud. In the tag cloud, weight is allocated to each tag based on, for example, search frequency and the weight of the tag is shown with its font size or color.
To emphasize particular images in a list display, images are often laid out with different sizes. There are, for example, a method limiting a region where images can be overlapped (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2001-188525), a method using a template (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2005-050051), and a method showing priorities of images (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2002-354367).
In the invention according to JP-A 2001-188525, however, an image is inserted to an empty region of a displayed image on a monitor, and the invention does not aim to display a plurality of images in list form. In the invention according to JP-A 2005-050051, a plurality of images is displayed only with a predetermined layout, and therefore randomness of the image layout cannot be assured. In the invention according to JP-A 2002-354367, images are laid out regularly in order to show their priories, which results in poor visual features.